I would remind you that extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in defense of justice is no virtue.

Monday, November 23, 2009

Worship Science

Those Right-Wing terrorists are at it again! This time they're endangering the entire planet with their misguided high-jinks. How dare they hack into the computers of one of the most prestigious Climate Science facilities in the world and publish the results of their theft?

Interestingly enough, the Scientists at the University Of East Anglia Climate Unit (they wrote the UN's IPCC paper on Climate Change) and their cohorts werent e-mailing each other expressing the outrage they felt at the dummies who couldnt understand the dire nature of the Global Warming Catastrophe, they werent pointing to the self-evidence and the watertight science that justifies their alarm and their solemn demand that we all lower our standard of living to try to fend off certain death in a soon-to-be rotisserie oven climate that our incandescent light bulbs and SUVs were about to cause. No, they had other things on their really smart Scientific minds.

Like why the data show no evidence of Global Warming and how to cover that very inconvenient truth up. That's why these extra-smart guys are earning the Big Bucks. They can look past the maze of often confusing 'facts' and see the Big Picture more sharply then us little nematodes. If the Big Picture calls for a bit of 'trickery' to adjust a few temperature graphs to make it appear that temperatures went up when in fact they went down then its the obligation of a Real Scientist to engage in that trickery. Those pesky tree-rings werent sending the right signals either. In fact, it would seem, to the uneducated mind, that every single thing these yo-yos have told us for the last twenty years is flat-out dead wrong and they've known about it the whole time.

I grew up in a 'scientific' family. My old man was a tech writer for years for a company that worked on the underground nuke tests in Nevada. In my house science was preferred over religion because science was true and religion was just a bunch of unsupported speculation. What am I to think now? Here are people who have shed the shackles of medieval superstition and dedicated themselves to a ruthless pursuit of the Truth, no matter where it might lead, who have found it necessary to resort to data adjustments to make the conclusions fit their preconceived opinions.

"Thou Shalt Not Lie'...that was some of that religious stuff. Pretty ludicrous. Where's the supporting evidence to show that that's something we ought to abide by? But something that the wise guys of Science didnt understand when they were laughing at Lot's wife turning into a pillar of salt and all that other stuff was that the totality of any belief system expresses itself in the type of society that arises from its tenets. For example, the mythology of Christianity gave rise to a society that rose to become the most free, the most advanced and the most humanitarian in human history. From that humanitarian concern for one's fellow man arose a branch of belief, one that became its own unique belief system, that posited that if the wisest and most enlightened among us would rewrite the Social Contract, which defines the relationship between an individual and society, that a truly just and fair world could emerge.

People who adhered to this belief system, now generally known as Socialism, abandoned the unscientific fairy stories about virgins having babies and people walking on water. They also abandoned the subjective pointing at some people as 'good' and others as 'bad' on the basis of one's actions. Morality is so complicated and there are so many different factors to consider. Who even needs morality when you have Science to lean on? And so these geniuses rolled up their Scientific sleeves and got to work.

The first try, the French Revolution, well...it started out great! Then it just lost its focus or something. Heads started rolling into baskets, a ruthless dictator emerged and fought a twenty-year war that killed millions and set fire to a continent. Well, part of Science is experimentation. Few hypotheses have had the testing that the Socialist hypothesis has had. The idea has been tried in dozens of countries, sometimes labeled Communism, Fascism, Social Democracy, People's Republics, Welfare States but somehow the correct formula has never been reached. The result is always the same. Disaster. Either the smoking ruins of National Socialist Germany or the degenerate chaos of a former Soviet Union or the genteel demographic death rattles of the Eurotrash Welfare states are the legacy of Socialism. Formerly vibrant cultures snuffed out, formerly energetic societies turning into aging hulks on the road to extinction are an intrinsic part of that legacy.

In every socialist country birth rates plunge. Its funny that no Brilliant Scientist has ever done a study to measure the relationship between the amount of government social programs and the birth rate. The country that was ravaged by Stalinism and is still an ugly crypto-socialist dictatorship has one of the lowest birth rates in the world. The high birth rate of Muslims in Russia masks the virtual disappearance of ethnic Russians. Almost every 'former' People's Republic is exactly the same. Western Europe, with its own bloated cradle-to-grave welfare systems and tax rates that border on total confiscation, will have depopulated itself in two generations. The immigrants from primitive countries with higher (but falling) birth rates are moving into an emptying continent filled with the ruins of the cathedrals built to a now-forgotten God. China hovers on the edge of a demographic disaster.

You would think that the same experiment getting the same result under a multitude of varying circumstances would lead minds steeped in Scientific Reason to the obvious conclusion.

But hey! This was about Global Warming wasnt it? That's Settled Science. In Stalin's USSR there was a biologist named Trofim Lysenko. He practiced 'settled science' too. If he settled on some science you better settle on it pretty quick yourself or he'd see to it that the appropriate agencies would 'settle' your hash. Just like what has happened to the 'Deniers' of Climate Gospel...oh, I mean Climate Science. While these Scientists were exchanging hundreds of e-mails about how the data werent backing up their speculations they were lauching political campaigns in faculties and in the public press smearing the 'Deniers' and trying to get them fired. Any Scientist too honest to keep his mouth shut and look at the Big Picture was castigated and sent to the edges of academic purgatory by the Settled Scientists, the one's who have so completely rejected Mythology and replaced it with Reason.

TS Eliot was right. The world ends not with a banging carbon-induced heat wave but with the whimper of our freedom and humanity being snuffed out by the dead hand of a Science that became a political religion.